2 games for the price of 2 games (on sale)

I get a little silly with games sometimes.  I've been mildly interested in Fight Night Champion, and mildly interested in Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit.  Toys R Us has a deal where you buy FNC or Bulletstorm for $60, and get NFS:HP (or Dead Space 2, Fallout 3 and some others) for $20.  I decided to bite.

An aside -  I know I bitch about games sometimes, and I know my rants usually center around arbitrary difficulty or control scheme.  I don't mind challenge, in fact, in some games, I absolutely love it.  However, I have a stressful existence.  Running a small business and working full time on a client site really take a toll on my psyche. At night, if I find myself with an hour or two - I'd much rather play a game than watch tv or a movie.  I call it my decompression time.  So, when a game is being a douche to me, I have no problem throwing it on the shelf of banishment and not going back to it.

I open up Fight Night first.  I have been mild on this game, but I miss boxing.  Really, it's just a vanished sport it seems.  With the advent of MMA (I could go on and on and on about my theories of MMA, but will spare the group), and lack of any dynamic personalities, boxing has just fallen by the wayside.  Ok - so - I pop in Fight Night.  I decide to go the Champion route.  Interesting enough - starts you off in a prison boxing match.  First complaint - the tutorial system is effectively non-existent.  At one point, it gives you a small blurb on the bottom of the screen about buttons, but I was in the middle of fighting when it popped, so it went away quickly.  The next fight is an amateur boxing event.  This is one with head gear and gloves, so it's more about landing punches.  I go into this one ill prepared, as the game hasn't really prepared me for a full bout.  Throughout the fight, I'm trying to be tactical, weaving, blocking, etc...but the cat is just racking up the punches on me, and has a 30 punch advantage running into the last round.  So, I just go balls out and start button mashing with the punch modifier on.  I knock him down.  He gets up.  I knock him down again.  I win.  Blech!  I'm fully aware that in later fights, this would be a surefire recipe for me to be knocked on my ass, but I'm just a little disgusted that it even worked in a lower level bout.  I get to the next fight, and my opponent doesn't want to fight.  He just backs off and runs around the ring.  This irritates me to no end, so I quit the game in disgust.  Let me fight, dammit.  If you want to put this type of style in the game, fine, but ease the player into the experience first, then introduce concepts like cutting off the ring and such.  Be warned, the game also features long loading screens, occasional freezes in the middle of a fight and a general feeling of lag.  It just seems to lack some polish and some small touches that could have made it a better experience. 

I was on a quest to have an enjoyable time with gaming last night, so I decided that I would give NFS:HP a try.  I've never been much of a fan of NFS - Shift annoyed me, and the others kind of had their roots in that Vin Diesel car crap.  I'm not good at racers, but I find them fun.  My all time favorite racing games have been Burnout 2 and PGR 2.  The game forced me to watch the introduction screens, the Shift 2 trailer and the "welcome to autolog" thing - I was livid.  Let me play the damn game.  Okay, so I get through all of that and I start my first race.  It's pretty damn cool.  Good graphics, decent car handling (I wasn't sliding all over the track on every turn).  There is rubber banding AI, which kind of irritates me, but all in all, it was a fun race.  I couldn't wait to do another, and another, and another.  I finally got to one race where I placed silver.  I thought I could do better, so I tried it again, I got a much improved time, but still finished second.  I must have played that race 5 times, but finally, was able to get a gold on it.  I think most of all, the game takes elements from Burnout (takedowns, shunting, slamming, etc...) and elements from arcade racers (nitrous is kind of like kudos) and blends them together.  I think I'm going to have some fun with this one.   I'd like to try some of the cop career, but right now, I'm just having fun with the speeder races. 

I'd like to think I paid $60 for NFS:HP and $20 for FNC.

I noticed that MLB 2k11 and Top Spin 4 demos hit last night.  I think I've got 2k11 preordered, and I like video game tennis (it's all pong to me).  I doubt I'll buy Top Spin 4 before a $20 sale, but am interested to see if it's more like Top Spin and less like Top Spin 3.